Google announces Nexus 5 smartphone

New Android ‘KitKat’ version also unveiled; phone sells for $349

DanGallagher

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Google Inc. unveiled a new Nexus smartphone on Thursday as well as a new version of its Android mobile operating system that it calls ‘KitKat.”

Google
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made the announcement on its Android blog. The new Nexus 5 — built by LG in partnership with Google — sells for a starting price of $349 on the company’s online Play store. Like other Nexus phones, the Nexus 5 is available unlocked and without the type of two-year plan that wireless carriers often use to subsidize handset purchases.

The Nexus 5 will later roll out to Amazon
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Best Buy
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and RadioShack
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along with wireless carriers Sprint
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and T-Mobile
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It sells in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan and Korea, and will be coming soon to India, Google says.

Google says the Nexus 5 is its thinnest phone yet at 8.59 mm. The device uses the new Snapdragon 800 processor from Qualcomm
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with a high-definition display.

In his blog post, Google senior VP for Android and Chrome Sundar Pichai said the new phone was designed to “showcase the latest Android innovations.” It will ship with the new Android 4.4 version that was also announced on Thursday under the name of KitKat.

“The first thing you’ll notice about KitKat is we’ve made the experience much more engaging: the book you’re reading, the game you’re playing, or the movie you’re watching — now all of these take center stage with the new immersive mode, which automatically hides everything except what you really want to see,” he wrote.

Pichai also noted that the company has “slimmed down” the memory footprint of Android with the new update, in the hopes of making the software usable for a wider array of phones.

“RAM (or memory) is one of the most expensive parts of a phone, and now Android can run comfortably on the 512MB of RAM devices that are popular in much of the world, bringing the latest goodies in Android 4.4 within reach for the next billion smartphone users,” he wrote.

Android KitKat will ship with the Nexus 5 and will soon be available for the Nexus 4, as well as the Nexus 7 and 10 tablets and the Google Play versions of the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One, though Pichai did not specify a release date for those versions.

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